The Warburg Institute has contributed more than 10,000 images of Renaissance and Baroque book illustrations to the Artstor Digital Library. The images originate from the collection of rare books housed at the Institute Library, and they illustrate a wide variety of fields — anatomy, art, astronomy, history, literature, among others.

The Warburg Institute was founded in Hamburg in 1921 by Aby Warburg (1866–1929), a German scholar of Renaissance art and culture, whose personal library formed its core. Because of the Nazi regime, the Institute relocated to London in 1933. The Institute was incorporated into the University of London in 1944, eventually becoming a founding institute of the University’s School of Advanced Study. The Institute is committed to the interdisciplinary study of the influence of classical tradition on all aspects of Western civilization. To support research in these fields, the Institute maintains comprehensive resources in a Library, a Photographic Collection, and an Archive.